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‘I couldn’t wait for the end of year footy trips to Hawaii and Bali, as I enjoyed the excitement of picking up girls and rushing back to tell the boys what had happened. I had sex pretty much as often as I liked; for a guy my age I was living the dream.’ Jason Stevens (former NRL player and Australian rep).

Jason goes on to say, ‘Sometimes I would recall that day in class when I had raised my hand like a moral crusader, and I’d think to myself, “What the hell did I say that for?” I had gone in the opposite direction and even argued with a friend of mine that sex is supposed to be fun and saving it for marriage is ridiculous and old-fashioned. I’m not sure why I took that stance. Maybe I was trying to justify my behaviour to him.

‘Sex is fun let’s face it. I enjoyed having sex in short term non-committed relationships, but saying these relationships was hard for me because the sexual excitement would soon fizzle out. My problem was I didn’t know how to develop a deep connection with someone. However, even when a relationship was lifeless and unexciting, it still hurt me whenever break up time came. Sometimes the pain was unbearable, so I would numb it with another sexual encounter.

‘Between the ages of 17 and 21 I had six relationships. It was like being on a merry-go-round, with each relationship taking me to a place of pain and frustration. I had to get off this ride.

‘Eventually I came to a point where I had to think about the way I was living. I started to question whether my “do it cause it feels good” attitude to sex and relationships was working for me. Although I was leading the typical single footballer’s lifestyle, dating great looking girls, getting VIP entry into the best nightclubs, and hanging out with the odd celebrity, it still wasn’t enough.

‘But a part of me had begun to accept that this is the way life is and that I couldn’t really expect much more from relationships that what I had experienced. I had heard of people being soul mates, but realistically I didn’t fancy my chances of finding one.

‘My parents had a troublesome marriage that ended in divorce, and for me this was more proof that that relationships rarely work out. It is harder to make a relationship work when you have never seen one work. Nevertheless, I wanted something different from what I had seen and experienced, so I took a step back and listened to the people who cared for me most and thought about what they had to say. Until this point I did whatever my hormones felt like doing, and found myself emulating my friends’ values and those presented on TV instead of developing my own…

‘Eventually, I made one of the biggest decisions of my life, which was not to have sex until the day I stand at the altar and say, “I do”. The first friend I told about my decision was a high school buddy. I wasn’t sure that he would understand because we had chased girls for as long as I can remember.

‘I felt nervous and awkward as I spoke to him on the phone, and when I told him about my decision he was disgusted. I will never forget his reply: “Jay, you’ve lost the plot. It’s unreasonable. You can’t expect that from anybody. As if we are expected to save sex for marriage when sex is so good!” It was hard to hear but I knew deep down I was right.

‘Funnily enough, three years later, my friend, who all but hung up on me that night, decided to save sex for marriage too. He changed his mind after he listened to me explain why it is better to wait. We now laugh about his initial reaction to my decision, but believe me, he didn’t think it was funny at the time.’32

How could it be that a society supposedly as advanced as ours could fail its young so miserably when it comes to something as sweet as romance, home and family and sex? Firstly, it doesn’t actually see itself as failing them. It has gone out of its way to teach them that (as the Russians say) ‘the lawyer is your conscience.’

The very idea that a young NRL player would refrain from sex because of his conscience (or his faith), is held up as ludicrous. We all know don’t we that lifestyle choice is an untouchable golden cow? How dare anyone teach a young man that certain lifestyle choices are wrong: not just for him but for everyone!

Jason was daring to challenge the idea that we are actually free to choose whatever lifestyle choice we like. He began to realise that we are broken people, that a part of us wants to actually choose what is evil and what will damage us and our family. That things are sinful because they are harmful, not because they have been randomly deemed to be wrong. Yes, it is true that ‘a man’s first duty is not to follow his conscience but to enlighten it’, but we must approach that ‘enlightening’ with the greatest respect and care.

Secondly, when a nation is having a crisis of meaning and has no foundation for making moral choices other than the majority vote, or vague feelings, you have a recipe for an outpouring of fundamentalist extremism on the part of whoever has enough money to hire the lawyers. The whole vision of the law being an ass and being a curse (both thoughts abounding in the bible by the way) is forgotten.

What shape might such extremism take? Bombs and flames? That’s highly unlikely in a society like ours, which prides itself on being ‘nice’, meticulously nice. It was recently said of a famous inquisitor, for example, that, ‘He was in possession of a brilliant intellect, he was a religious fundamentalist and you could not hope to meet a nicer bloke.’33 Niceness is a favoured quality of all the best dictators whether they talk of Jesus, PC Democracy or the Third Reich.

So, with all the pc courtesy in the world, and without the complications of inner meaning in the heart of the ‘young man’, we can do our work unhindered by any gods or sacred texts. Our dilemma of course is that in our efforts to create meaning inside ‘the young man’ through politically correct pronouncements, we have come full circle to law as the only means: politically correct law. All we now have are shame and coercion, rather than wisdom and grace, as our weapons of choice. Government administrators—not friends, not parents, not the young man’s soul (he’s not even allowed to have one)—make the calls on what family, marriage, home and family life will look like.

Not that all pc is bad. The original thought behind courtesy and duty of care etc. was love. Where it all begins to go wrong is when we lose the heart and soul of it and begin doing it for no other reason than the fact that it is ‘the done thing’. As TS Elliot said, ‘The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.’

Another way it can go awry is when an entire nation loses its spiritual core and pc becomes the only moral compass left. Suddenly everything must be legislated and we find ourselves living in an absurd world where freedom of speech, freedom to camp somewhere, freedom to walk somewhere, freedom of expression and all kinds of other freedoms are seen as threats. Classroom Moralists who were once politely tolerated, are now heroes, even Prime Ministers.

Art is one of the first things to begin to wilt in such a poorly fertilised garden. A brilliant song will be written but all the audience will think about is the fact that it used a stereotype, wasn’t inclusive, was done by someone of the wrong racial grouping or didn’t fit the funding criteria. How did this disease of thinking like a responsible social scientist creep into so many souls, even (God-forbid) artistic souls? How the mighty have fallen! I once came away from a writers’ festival with the distinct impression that every writer there had been tamed, de-clawed and de-fanged.

When a society (that idolises lifestyle choice) invites people of faith to agree with its opinions about what is right and wrong in sex and marriage, it’s asking ancient mythical music to sit down at table with bureaucrats and lawyers and endorse the majority vote. Since when was God the puppet of the government? Lots of times unfortunately, thanks to compliant priests and ministers of the Royal Order, as the bible (and recent history) shows us.

The real question is, as Ravi Zacharias says, ‘How does anyone ever know if anything is right or wrong?’ The only solid ground the prosecutors found—at Nuremberg—for prosecuting the Nazis, was to invoke the moral law of God. In the heat and the dust of legal debate, this point of view was almost lost.

Not that legal debate is a bad thing. Everyone should be allowed to have their say. For example, a ‘magazine for homosexuals explains that people today “Don’t want to fit into any boxes—not gay, straight, lesbian or bisexual ones.” Instead “they want to be free to change their minds.” The article was addressed to people who had come out of the closet as homosexuals, but later found themselves attracted to heterosexual relationships again. So ‘What am I?’ they wondered. Not to worry the author reassured them. The idea that one is born with a certain gender that cannot be changed is so modernist. Society is moving to postmodern view in which you can choose any gender you want, at any time.” It’s being called the ‘PoMosexual view.’ 33 (a)

Steve Gershom (a gay Catholic), has another perspective: ‘I have heard a lot about how mean the Church is, and how bigoted, because she opposes gay marriage.How badly she misunderstands gay people, and how hostile she is towards us. My gut reaction to such things is: Are you freaking kidding me? Are we even talking about the same Church?

‘When I go to Confession, I sometimes mention the fact that I’m gay, to give the priest some context. I’ve always gotten one of two responses: either compassion, encouragement, and admiration, because the celibate life is difficult and profoundly counter-cultural; or nothing at all, not even a ripple, as if I had confessed eating too much on Thanksgiving.

‘Of the two responses, my ego prefers the first—who doesn’t like thinking of themselves as some kind of hero? — but the second might make more sense. Being gay doesn’t mean I’m special or extraordinary. It just means that my life is not always easy. (Surprise!) And as my friend J. said when I told him recently about my homosexuality, “I guess if it wasn’t that, it would have been something else.” Meaning that nobody lives without a burden of one kind or another. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel said: “The man who has not suffered, what can he possibly know, anyway?”

‘Where are all these bigoted Catholics I keep hearing about? When I told my family a year ago, not one of them responded with anything but love and understanding. Nobody acted like I had a disease. Nobody started treating me differently or looking at me funny. The same is true of every one of the Catholic friends that I’ve told. They love me for who I am.

‘Actually, the only time I get shock or disgust or disbelief, the only time I’ve noticed people treating me differently after I tell them, is when I tell someone who supports the gay lifestyle: “Celibacy?! You must be some kind of freak.”

‘Hooray for tolerance of different viewpoints. I’m grateful to gay activists for some things—making people more aware of the prevalence of homosexuality, making homophobia less socially acceptable—but they also make it more difficult for me to be understood, to be accepted for who I am and what I believe. If I want open-mindedness, acceptance, and understanding, I look to Catholics.’ 33 (b)

The Royal Order ‘god’ of the West. doesn’t want to know about the above point of view. It always insists that its way of doing things—’acquiring enough power and knowledge to tame the terror and eliminate the darkness’ and make it easier for us to indulge our appetites—is making ‘everything better and better’. It must insist on this, and it must silence the voices raised in alarm—especially those voices in non-western countries. Hence it’s indignation, its strident affirmation, its determination to keep it’s perspective on the issues on the front page and to never, ever talk about what is being assumed behind these issues. In our case, what is being assumed is that ‘we all know what is right and what is wrong’ when it comes to sex and marriage: ‘we all’ being that wealthy minority group (in the global village) known as ‘the west’.

Seriously, how can we—the western, secular enlightenment world, which is lousy with ‘free sex’, drugs and broken families—even begin to talk to the non-western world about what is right and wrong with marriage and sex? Our social workers tell us that we are facing a virtual tsunami of abused children right here in Australia. The rumour is that—in order not to cause too much alarm—childhood trauma categories are being re-written.

Words come to mind, words like, ‘self-importance, sense of superiority; high-handedness, condescension, contempt, sneering, scoffing; presumption.’ According to the thesaurus, these words relate to one single word: ‘arrogance.’ Perhaps even embarrassment. The world of horse racing might use the metaphor of a ‘nerve-blocking operation’ being carried out in order to hide the truth of the embarrassing social train-wreck called ‘Australian family life’.

It’s the kind of thing that provoked Jesus to say, ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!’ (Matt 23:27)

‘If you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything,’ John Mellencamp used to sing. But what if the thing you’re standing for has been made to look ridiculous? “Do not give dogs what is holy,’ Jesus said. ‘And do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.’34 It’s no surprise that there’s so much anger directed at God. We sense that our Maker has concluded we won’t be told, has walked away from us and is allowing an ‘unmaking’ of what we have made so well.

A few years ago I was reading a book on Spinoza (a philosopher from the 17th Century) where the author/editor, in his preface, had this to say: ‘For to-day in marriage, if anywhere, it is glaringly evident that the legal or religious or social ceremonial law can at best secure man or woman wealth and social position.’35

The writer (Joseph Ratner) had a point but in making it he betrayed something about himself. What he failed to see was the fact that many couples will tell you they took the marriage vows not primarily to secure their happiness—or because they thought their love was so great it would never fail—but because they loved each other and God so much, they wanted to give themselves to creating a mysterious thing called a home and a family. They wanted to grow a garden where children would be safe and blessed and where friends (and even the lost and hurting and broken) could come and enjoy the warmth and grace of a lovely fountain of faith, hope and love.

What an ambition! What a high hope. Of course they know their love will waver, it’s why they take the vows. And it’s during those times they will need something as sober and as public as a vow (supported by a God who is a forgiver, and a community of family and friends) to hold them to what they promised each other. And this promise is not just a matter of ‘staying married’, it’s a commitment to cultivating a beautiful garden where things like kindness, forgiveness, honesty, reconciliation and communion can grow.

Even so, if it were to stop there it would merely be another ‘lifestyle choice’ thing: ‘what floats your boat’ as they say. What really makes this other way of living and of seeing life so shocking and so dangerous as far as our secular world is concerned is that first and foremost it’s a commitment to another world, and another King. In this world the very idea of putting any form of ‘life style choice’ first is laughable. Those who live this way are following Jesus the Messiah, who said, ‘Anyone who would come after me must deny all right to themselves, take up their cross daily and follow me.’36

Yes, of course this is open to dangerous abuse but what a fear-breaking (individual elevating) force it has proven be against all the ruthless might of Pharisaic misogyny, stonings, Roman cruelty, English Monarchy, African Warfare, Protestant and Catholic Inquisitions, Soviet terror and now—perhaps—it might be just what is needed to give people courage to stand up to a democratic society so obsessed with democracy that it’s creating a coercive PC Dictatorship.

In his intro to Spinoza, Ratner goes on to say, ‘Happiness or blessedness lie altogether beyond its (lawful marriage’s) powerful reach. Marriage is sanctified or made blessed not by the ceremonial law or priest or city clerk but by the divine law of love. Natural love or free love, free from all ceremonial coercions, is not merely not a questionable source of marital happiness: it is the only source. The ceremonial law, the legal or religious marriage custom, has nothing whatsoever to do with human happiness. If by free “love” is meant love free from all legal, social and religious ceremonial restraints, then free love is, according to Spinoza, the only basis of rational marriage.’37

There are things to admire in Ratner’s words, his point that laws will never give us happiness for example. But what does he mean by the ‘divine law of love’? And what about ‘natural love’? In the end ‘what is natural’ is defined by the nature of the individual. A predator will tell you that their behaviour is perfectly natural, and so also will a paedophile. Who decides?

One minute we are nodding our heads in agreement about the banality of it all. ‘The law is an ass’ we say, but then (on the basis of that) we are expected to take a great leap of logic and say that ‘free love’ is the only basis for rational marriage. This is a high and optimistic view of human nature. ‘Viva the revolution’—or maybe not.

Ratner wrote before the era of atheist empires where ‘60million people were killed by the Soviet Communists, 35 million by the Chinese communists and 21 million by the Nazis –not to mention one quarter of the population of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge.’38

Jesus had a much more realistic approach when he warned us, ‘For from the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, all sexual immorality, theft, lying, and slander.’ (Matt 5:19). Does this have to be a formula for hating ourselves? Of course not. Jesus directs us to love ourselves in Mark 12:31 and especially to learn how to confess and forgive.

But isn’t this outlook an impetus for harsh laws? It could be, and it has been by those who take the bible the wrong way. One major point of the bible’s library of thousands of years of history is that ‘living just by the law brings a curse’. Our only hope is something new on the inside: people who live with courage, grace and humility because of what they have become on the inside, of what they are, not because they have to.

“You search the Scriptures,’ Jesus said, ‘because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me!’39 In another place, the Apostle Paul says, ‘The plan wasn’t written out with ink on paper, with pages and pages of legal footnotes, killing your spirit. It’s written with Spirit on spirit, his life on our lives!40

The fact is that we need grace and we need each other, which means we need laws to help us and even to hold us back when the ‘beast within’ threatens to destroy us and our loved ones. But without that mysterious grace within, we have nothing but pc laws, shame and coercion.

History itself gives us plenty of examples. Whoever said, ‘It doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you believe in something’, hadn’t thought about Pol Pot and Adolf Hitler. Sooner or later, experience forces us to realise that a person’s soul is far too beautiful and dangerous for their beliefs to be a matter of their own private business. We fail to care, to pray, and fail to challenge, debate and disagree at our peril. Like it or not, we are forced to be our brother’s keeper. And who better than Jesus to be our guiding light for that impossible task?

On the one hand, there’s much fun to be had in this great ‘lovely mess’ and then there are these awful consequences—when we don’t give a #@*!—that few want to speak of, and if they do, they are howled down. ‘You’ve lost the plot!’ Jason’s friend said. But that friend would now say he is so thankful Jason spoke up. Both men realised that there is such a thing as becoming lost like sheep. But if there’s no meaning (or only pc coerced ‘classroom meaning’) ‘being lost’ is not a concept. We realise why CS Lewis calls nature a ‘dumb witch’, she beguiles us with her magic but she’s unable to teach us anything.

Eva Cassidy sings a song that says it all …

‘Tall trees in Georgia
They grow so high
They shade me so
And sadly walking
Through the thicket I go

The sweetest love
I ever had I left aside
Because I did not
Want to be any man’s bride

But now I’m older
And married I would be
I found my sweetheart
But he would not marry me.

When I was younger
The boys all came around
But now I’m older
And they’ve all settled down.

“Control your mind, my girl
And give your heart to one
For if you love all men
You’ll be surely left with none”.

Tall trees in Georgia
They grow so high
They shade me so
And sadly walking
Through the thicket I go.’41

I’m sitting on floorboards with an eager-eyed group of children around me. We’re in the middle of the story of Samson (from the Old Testament7). Some of the boys in the audience are rapt, other children look incredulous, and others a bit wary. What on earth is Mister Vol telling us this story for? they seem to be thinking. The story concludes.

‘Why is this story in the bible?’ someone says.
‘Good question,’ I say. ‘Why do you think it’s in the bible?’
There’s a long silence and we leave it there for the moment.
‘Where did he go wrong?’ I ask them.
‘He played up,’ someone says.
‘And he broke his promise,’ another says.
‘But he didn’t cut his hair and he didn’t get on the grog,’ I say.
‘What’s “grog?”’ another voice says.
‘Alcohol,’ someone explains.
‘So,’ I ask again. ‘How come it all went pear-shaped?’

We talk for about the fact that there were actually three parts to Samson’s vow: to guard his soul, to not cut his hair and to stay off the grog. Samson failed on the inside I explain to them. We conclude the session by singing a little song …

‘Keeping the rules is a start.
But what’s in the heart?’

To be fair on Samson—in his efforts to defend an oppressed minority tribe—he did some pretty heroic stuff: tearing a door off a city and walking away with it, killing a lot of Philistines with the jaw bone of an ass and (at the last) caving in the roof of a palace on his enemies. The story is worthy of inclusion in any Home And Away episode.

But you can’t read it without feeling for Samson’s mum and dad. The baby boy was marked out to be a great ruler according to prophesy and it leaves you wondering about many other part successful/ big-part failed rulers. Did Mao Zedong’s parents, for example, secretly pray for him? What if he had made some different choices and hadn’t given in to the urge to liquidate millions?

Books on leadership tell us that there is process and there is task. History is littered with leaders who failed on one side or the other. Historians and historical commentators keep these two aspects in mind whenever they evaluate leaders. But there are some who don’t.

In his book Atheist Manifesto8, Michael Onfray certainly doesn’t when he attempts to critique monotheism. He describes the monotheistic religions as being ‘religions of the book’9, suggesting that they are all on about the same kind of stuff: keeping rules and regulations to keep God happy. What he doesn’t tell us is that it was Islam that coined the phrase, ‘People of the Book’.

Jesus, on the other hand, would never have used such language. “You search the Scriptures,’ Jesus said, ‘because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me!’10 In another place, the Apostle Paul says, ‘The plan wasn’t written out with ink on paper, with pages and pages of legal footnotes, killing your spirit. It’s written with Spirit on spirit, his life on our lives!11

Onfray’s misrepresentation of Christianity and the bible goes on and on … He talks of the prohibition against eating from the ‘Tree of Knowledge’12 to suggest that Christianity has a bias against science. The fact is that Genesis says it is the ‘Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil’13. Science has never been about the study of good and evil. And anyone who reads James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers’ can see that this is unfounded. Hannam makes an overwhelming case for medieval Christianity laying a deep foundation for modern science.

Onfray goes on to say, ‘Genesis says that God created the world in a week.’ It doesn’t actually. Onfray has reached this conclusion by refusing to recognise the literary genre, which is clearly poetic, mythic language. Genesis has no problem—for example—in telling us that the sun was created on the fourth day. The majority of Christian teachers agree that the word ‘day’ being used here is to be interpreted as a ‘period of time’. One commentator even suggests that the author/s of Genesis recorded a series of visions whereby the words, ‘there was evening and there was morning’ represented a kind of curtain call.

We will miss the point of these early chapters of Genesis if we don’t appreciate the genre. What we have here is a remarkable example of ‘inspired myth’ and as such it is laden with phenomenological language (describing things as they appear), drama and poetry. We use phenomenological language every day when we say things like, ‘the sun rose’. How much more lovely than saying ‘the earth turned on it’s axis’.

But Onfray won’t be told. He says, ‘Genesis teaches that there cannot be multiple worlds.’ Where exactly it teaches that he fails to explain. He goes on to to say, ‘Christians insist the world is 4000 years old.’ What he doesn’t tell us is that this statement is not to be found anywhere in the bible. Onfray has simply chosen to substitute orthodox ‘Christian’ teaching with that of a minority group who read this entire library of 66/73 books the same way he does: without any recognition of genre. What would it be like hearing Onfray’s interpretations of Shakespeare?

Not satisfied with this, he tells us the bible teaches it ‘Was all Eve’s fault.’14 No wonder some people are up in arms about Christianity. Unfortunately they are misled—happily misled—because anger is impatient with process, with facts, it prefers convenient untruths.

When this lens of bigotry and prejudice is put away, it’s not hard to see a delicate process of God becoming incarnate and joining the sister/brotherhood of humankind. These early chapters of Genesis give us an unfolding drama which—rather than being some literalist/science text attempting to explain Carbon atoms and the Big Bang—is a telling account of the deep sense of broken-ness and wonder we humans live and wrestle with each day. It’s why many of our greatest artists and composers have painted it and composed symphonies about it. It’s why it fills art galleries and theatres all over the world.

As a case in point, we find a brilliant artist’s interpretation of another kind of ‘Genesis fall’ in the novel Phantastes.

“I looked around over my shoulder and there on the ground lay a black shadow, the size of a man. It was so dark that I could see it in the dim light of the lamp, which shone full upon it, apparently without thinning at all the intensity of its hue.”

“‘I told you,’ said the woman, ‘you had better not look into that closet.’
“‘What is it?’ I said, with a growing sense of horror.
“‘It is only your shadow that has found you,’ she replied. ‘Everybody’s shadow is ranging up and down looking for him. I believe you call it by a different name in your world: yours has found you as every person’s is almost certain to do who looks into that closet….’”28

In this story, the awful moment of shadow attachment is followed by a long quest, which in-part answers the question our society has put to Western Christendom:

“Is your collapse proof that you guys have been wrong all along?”
“No,” the voice of the ancient muse seems to say. “It is as it always has been: the blood of gods courses in the veins of men and there will be no apologies, great joy and great trouble.”

There was a time when I feared that the cold, dark churches were right: God was the stern cook and cop of civilization, the gate crasher on all flesh and fun. But the more I looked into it, the more it seemed that this idea came not from God but from a bent vision of spirituality. At one point, having finished reading the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita, I was relieved to find myself reading an Old Testament psalm29 in which a man and his God were celebrating loudly with wine and oil and bread.

“Yes!” God seemed to shout back at me “This world is a mess, but I love it!”30
“This is my kind of God,” I thought. “The true mother-father of us all.”

This picture of a God who delights in human flesh makes so much sense when you read the words of John 1:14: “The word became flesh.”31 The very idea of God joining the human race feels so theatrical, so romantic and so right. No wonder it has inspired a never-ending fountain of music, paintings and wars.

30 A thought inspired and provoked by a Reinhold Niebuhr comment in Neibuhr and His Age: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Prophetic Role and Legacy by Charles C. Brown. Reflecting on the gloomy prospects of the world, Niebuhr said, ‘It’s a mess … but I like it!’ which apparently brought the house down.

When faced with criticism, we must weigh both the critic and the criticism. CS Lewis reminds us, “The most dangerous ideas in a society are not the ones being argued, but the ones being assumed.” Unfortunately, the author of the following article—http://www.rawstory.com/2015/06/captive-virgins-polygamy-and-sex-slaves- what-marriage-would-look-like-if-we-actually-followed-the bible/#.VZLXfwt3fcw.facebook—makes numerous assumptions. Here are a few…

#1 ‘The Bible is one book.’ It’s actually a library of books (sixty-six or seventy- three depending on whether you go with the Protestants or Catholics) collected over a few thousand years and comprised of a number of genres: myth, poetry, drama and history: all needing to be interpreted appropriately.

#2: ‘Believers are those with a narrow, fundamentalist outlook.’ The fact is that most who love, read and live by the bible, do not hold to this outlook.

#3: ‘There is only one God being advocated in the Bible.’ There are at least two versions of ‘God’ to be found in this library we refer to as the ‘Bible’: the God of the Royal Order1 and the God of the Prophets.

The God of the Royal Order is always assumed to be on the side of those in power, inspiring and justifying the priests and kings in their stonings, conquests, enslavements, keeping of temple prostitutes, harems and mountains of gold. The God of the Prophets is normally the minority report and says things like, “I can’t stand your religious meetings. I’m fed up with your conferences and conventions. I want nothing to do with your religion projects, your pretentious slogans and goals. I’m sick of your fund-raising schemes, your public relations and image making. I’ve had all I can take of your noisy ego-music.”2

One of the fascinating things about the bible is this ongoing wrestle between those advocating a supposed God who gives us, ‘Enough knowledge and power to control the terror and eliminate the darkness’3 and a God who is on about ‘another Kingdom’, an invisible realm of justice, mercy and grace. Those who advocate this other mysterious God—who is called by various nicknames—say that he carries with him a deep experience of dread but also of loving-kindness. So it’s not always easy to tell which ‘God-voice’ we are hearing. When we read, ‘Thus says the Lord,’ we need to ask ourselves which God is being represented. The Chronicles of Narnia tell us that ‘Aslan is not a tame lion’ and it was this mantra that was used to great effect by the pretender (Shift) against the kind hearted little donkey (Puzzle).

Individuals in various books & letters of this bible-library, are empowered to speak directly to God and to even challenge God. As one of the psalm writers says…

‘I’m a black hole in oblivion.
You’ve dropped me into a bottomless pit,
Sunk me in a pitch-black abyss.
I’m battered senseless by your rage,
Relentlessly pounded by your waves of anger.
You turned my friends against me,
Made me horrible to them.
I’m caught in a maze and can’t find my way out,
Blinded by tears of pain and frustration.’4

Jesus, for example, confronted the voice of the Royal Order when he said things like, ‘You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…’5

Many who read the bible and love and live by it, see it as an amazing world of ‘testimony à dispute à advocacy’, which enables them to understand the ‘cosmic static’ of their own personal experience of what some refer to as a Higher Power or possibly their own delusions. But to stop there would be tragic and would leave the Ghandis and Martin Luther Kings of the world powerless before the Royal Order: both of these men drawing heavily on the teachings of Jesus.

And so it is that the bible—by gifting us with the voices of the prophets and of Jesus—prepares us to wrestle with the intimidation and brutality of the Royal Order and, interestingly, it teaches us to wrestle with God aka Jacob’s Wrestle (Gen 32: 22-32).

We see this dramatically in Franco Zeferelli’s version of Jesus of Nazareth where Barabbas is depicted as a freedom fighter attempting to recruit Jesus. Having heard Barabbas out, Jesus tells him to ‘love his enemies’: the freedom fighters now hate him as a coward. In another scene, Jesus opposes those who want to stone a woman for committing adultery. He saves the woman’s life and the Pharisees (representing the Royal Order) are furious: the misogynists now hate him as a liberal. Again, Jesus heals the servant of a Roman soldier: the racists now hate him as Rome-lover.

Displaying their ignorance of all this, the author of the above article says, ‘Furthermore, none of the norms that are endorsed and regulated in the (so-called) Old Testament law – polygamy, sexual slavery, coerced marriage of young girls—are revised, reversed, or condemned by Jesus.’

Not content to leave it at that, another great leap is made where the author says,
‘It (the bible) gives them the divine thumbs up.’ Exactly where it does this we are not told. There’s quite a lot the author doesn’t tell us: it’s called being ‘economical with the truth’.

What they don’t tell us, for example, is that the Old Testament laws were actually improvements on the laws of surrounding nations, which were far more brutal. Having to marry the girl you raped, or pay her father fifty shekels if he opposed the marriage, and never being allowed to divorce her (5a)—in an era where the raped girl might possibly be left unable to marry—was actually a powerful deterrent. You now had to take responsibility for her and you could never leave her. Interestingly there is no recorded instance of a girl being forced to marry a rapist in the Old Testament.

Of course, this ‘progressive revelation’ (6) was not going to stop there, one day (God hopes) society might reach the stage where the justice system would be so influenced by the bible that the offender could be jailed and the girl could go on her way. ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’ and anyone who has ever had to work for reform knows the foolhardiness of the idealist who blindly wants everything changed at once and in the end only serves to keep everything the same.

A case in point is those who worked to abolish slavery in the US: the purists arguing most vehemently in congress for an immediate and complete abolition were actually playing into the hands of those advocating slavery. It wasn’t until they could be persuaded to adopt a moderate position that Abraham Lincoln and co. were able to succeed. In another example, Michael Collins (of IRA fame) faced the same problem when he was a negotiating with the English. Back home, Michael’s old enemy—De Valera—constantly agitated for no compromise while Michael was arguing for a step- by-step process. Valera would have none of it and in so doing threatened to destroy both Collins (which is what he wanted) and the whole process of negotiation for Irish autonomy.

In Jesus’ case, in the thirty years preceding his birth, an average of five thousand Jews were killed (by the Romans) every year in messianic uprisings. It’s highly likely that—as Zeffirelli suggests in his film—Jesus was courted by freedom fighters (possibly even the Romans) and the Pharisees. Under the watchful eye of the Royal Order, Jesus refused to be intimidated and risked imprisonment and execution by standing up to both friends and enemies. Thanks to his courage, his teachings paved the way for the elevation of the rights of women, children and all oppressed peoples. No reading of history is able to contest this.

1 Brueggemann W. Spirituality of the Psalms p.29 Augsburg Fortress 2002. Brueggemann writes about this in detail in Prophetic Imagination

Watched The Gambler1 the other day. It’s an act of treason beyond all reason. He’s not a gambler he’s a suicide looking for a way. So he rolls the dice, ‘All on black’ he says. ‘All.’ He’s a funeral, a burial waiting to happen. He’s on the run; he finds the one he wants. But she’s not; she’s a distraction from reality. She’s what the Director wants, cause it’s what we want, cause it sells—supposedly.

Yes, disappointment’s settling in amongst us film watchers of this film in this lounge room. Mister Main Character rolls the dice, it all comes down and he’s on his own. Nothing left. He’s running hard and running.

The Maker of the film comes to a place and I’m on edge. This could be a great ending. Will the Maker have the balls to go there? He runs and stops. Will he lose the nerve: flip out and go back to default, to one-dimensional material dollar/job//sex?

Yep, exactly what happens. Director caves when he could have made. A real ending that swayed you, and made you. Could have had it right there. Could have taken us by the neck and ran us headlong into real! A baptism2 of fire, busting a thousand years of baptismal lies, of pretty fonts and white frills telling us baptisms are lovely. They are not!

That water down there is about death! That fierce determination to have done with whatever this thing is that whispers in my ear all day every day telling me it’s #*%! The only cure for the pretty boy at eighteen with his girl in every town telling me twenty years ago that he’d come good one day and now here we are twenty years later—those girls are angry and so are the kids. He’s a loser they all say.

O my God! How did that happen! Seems like it was only yesterday and his eyes were young and bright, so young and bright, and full of fight. Baptism is what he needs, real and ruthless—funeral style. But he worded his way around me, around us all, wormed his way towards whatever it was that whispered.

And here we are watching The Gambler! The Drunken Cowboy/Jackeroo! So beloved of those girls wanting beautiful boys to save. Mister Main Character is all out of options. Just two left now: the girl or the baptism. What a perfect place for a funeral for the Shadow Self: real crucifixion on Skull Hill—Easter style. Perfect time, lay it on the line, embrace this traitor, this act of treason we call baptism. Torn up and thrown about and letting the Someone Else make it, Maker of Suns and Stars and Seas. Go down into waters and surrenders.

But no! No funeral for that Dark and Broken Self, just a new girl to live with, make angry in old age and rage.

1 Recent Mark Wahlberg film
2 baptism: word origin relates to shipwrecks and violence e.g, a mob ransacking a city

This photograph is from a random drive through the Kimberley when I was researching my thriller project. The story is so embedded in my imagination now that I can’t look at this without being inside a 4WD coming down that hill at night, the vehicle chasing ant-nest shadows as it bounces and crashes its way along a boggy track.

Storms are about and you can smell mud and see lightning on the horizon. At the foot of the hill is a homestead, which faces onto a greasy clay pan. Beyond that the Styx Gorge awaits: jagged, black as pitch, and the only place to hide.

On the way to the bottom of the ridge, to hoped-for safety, this bruised and hurting little family are at their wit’s end, longing to be out of there, to be together at home again. The young daughter, Oksy, captures what they all feel with her questions and her prayers.

The mother, Mia, holds onto the hope that a higher power of infinite love is somehow at work—even in the midst of their hell. Oksy’s father, Red, sees things differently: they are out to defy a hostile universe, period. S#*! happens, he likes to say. And you have to respect his point of view. He’s no fool—without him Oksy would be dead.

Each has been drawing some kind of strength from their worldview. Oksy, the mysterious strength of the child’s naïve faith: a beautiful trust that somehow good will win-out. Mia, the strength of what has been referred to as stage five faith, which is ‘okay with God’s mystery, unavailability and strangeness.’1 Red draws from his courage and skill as a warrior.

Watching their story unfold and trying to write it down always leads back into my own world. Just now for example, I found out that a beloved friend of our family (Shirley Blake) who has given oceans of grace and strength to us—passed away two days ago.

Shirley was no ordinary woman, she was a Mount Everest in the spiritual world: unknown to many but famous with God. Our family literally ‘rises up and calls her blessed.’ She was, in the double meaning of John’s Gospel, a woman ‘lifted up and glorified,’2 which means she brought joy to many and (like Jesus himself) was to be subjected to awful brutality.

In her case, one ‘crucifixion’ that I am aware of, happened a long time before she actually passed from this earth. Having given many years of her life to loving her neighbours (and their children) with amazing kid’s clubs, stories and laughter, she was well into the second half of her life and had become the beloved ‘Aunty Shirley’ to children all over Broken Hill.

One day a man entered her house and brutally assaulted her. She cried out and no help came. Instead, she was given a vision of Jesus weeping. She explained to us later that somehow she felt (as awful as it was) that Jesus was sharing in the torture together with her. This was hard for me to hear at the time.

The New Testament supports Shirley’s explanation. Jesus shed tears at the death of his good friend Lazarus, for example, but they were not tears of weakness, they were the tears of a man strong enough in his manhood to weep in public. Such weeping gives strength to his followers even two thousand years later. How could that be? How could a weeping and wounded savior give power and grace?

These lines from Edward Shillito’s Jesus of the Scars put us in the picture…

‘The heavens frighten us, they are too calm
In all the universe we have no place.
Our wounds are hurting us, where is the balm?
Lord Jesus, by your scars, we claim your grace.

If, when the doors are shut, you draw near
Only reveal those hands, that side of yours
We know today what wounds are, have no fear
Show us your scars, we know the countersign.

The other gods were strong but you were weak
They rode—you stumbled to a throne
But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak
And not a god has wounds but you alone.’

Jesus told his followers, ‘As the father has sent me, even so I send you.’3 St. Paul goes on to say that the deal includes sharing ‘in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is the church.’4 This is confronting because it suggests that not only was Jesus sharing in Shirley’s sufferings, she was sharing in his and it was for the benefit of her fellow Christians: we know who we are.

Charles Williams elaborates on this when he says that ‘Sometimes, in order for the fire of heaven to fall in one place, an altar must be built in another.’5 Shirley’s altar was certainly that for many: instead of being a place of bitter trauma, it became a treasure chest from which holy fire poured into the souls of others. Thank you Aunty Shirley and thank you God.

‘The way of the Cross’, writes Michael Quoist, ‘winds through our towns and cities, our hospitals and factories, and through our battlefields…It is in front of these new Stations of the Cross that we must stop and meditate and pray to the suffering Christ for strength to love him enough and for strength to act.’6

1 Stages of Faith, James Fowler, 1981, Harper and Row

2 John 8:28 RSV Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of man, then you will
know that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own authority but speak thus as the
Father taught me.

3 John 20:21 RSV

4 Colossians 1:24 ‘Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I
complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that
is, the church.’ RSV

‘Does not every movement in the passion write large some common element in the sufferings of our race? First, the prayer of anguish, not granted. Then he turns to his friends. They are asleep as ours, or we, are so often, or busy, or away, or preoccupied. Then he faces the Church, the very Church that he brought into existence. It condemns him. This is also characteristic. In every Church, in every institution, there is something which sooner or later works against the very purpose for which it came into existence. But there seems to be another chance. There is the state, in this case the Roman state. Its pretensions are far lower than those of the Jewish church, but for that very reason it may be free from local fanaticisms. It claims to be just on a rough worldly level. Yes, but only in so far as is consistent with political expediency and raison d’état.* One becomes a counter in a complicated game. But even now all is not lost. There is still an appeal to the People—the poor and simple whom he had blessed, whom he had healed and fed and taught, to whom he himself belongs. But they have become overnight (it is nothing unusual) a murderous rabble shouting for his blood. There is then nothing left but God. And to God, God’s last words are, “Why hast thou forsaken me?”

You see how characteristic, how representative, it all is. The human situation writ large. These are among the things it means to be a man. Every rope breaks when you seize it. Every door is slammed as you reach it. To be like the fox at the end of the run; the earths all staked.’

* a purely political reason for action on the part of a ruler or government, especially where a departure from openness, justice, or honesty is involved.

(Lewis CS. Letters to Malcolm Ch. 8 – also in The Business of Heaven April 6)

Two words I’ve found helpful in the coaching process are ‘enable’ and ‘galvanize’. To ‘enable’ means to make something possible and to ‘galvanize’ means to ‘shock or excite someone into action’. Interestingly, the word galvanize comes from an old French word meaning to ‘stimulate via electricity’. It’s to do with that mysterious ambience (or presence), which a particular ‘something’ brings to your day, causing you to be energized and to take effective action.

This ‘something’ can be a number of things: it might be your partner, your family, your boss or your team for example. It might also be a symbol, ritual or even your worldview. And yes, of course, it might be your coach.

Unfortunately, our society is obsessed with this aspect of coaching and, as a result, tends to neglect the enabling part. ‘Live your passion’ it says. But what if the ideas in your head, not the passions in your heart, are what will make you or break you? And what if one of those ideas is that we live in a universe that uncannily draws our attention to what is significant about us? Trying hard to do what everyone else is doing could be a great distraction. And complaining that ‘they wouldn’t let you get your Harvard degree and your nice house’ and that ‘life hurts and is unfair’, starts to look positively embarrassing.

What if a monster called ‘education’ has almost completely killed off the joy of learning in you? What if your parents taught you it was all about putting your head down and working harder? You can’t see where your going when your head is down all the time.

What if you’re the most talented young spin bowler in town but you can’t afford the ticket to a coaching clinic? A team that complains they can’t do without you for that weekend is about as useful as a hole in the head. And so also is a life coach who sits in an office somewhere and wants this young cricketer to pay him $100 (which he can’t afford) to tell him that.

Imagine this. You’re a young boy and your mother has spent hard earned cash on getting you piano lessons in a music conservatorium in Ireland. But piano is not you. One day your mother says, ‘Enough is enough’ and goes down there to terminate your lessons. On the way out of your ‘last ever piano lesson’, and possibly your ‘last ever music lesson’, you hear an old man playing drums.

‘What’s going on in there?’ you say to your mother.
‘Let’s have a look,’ she says.
Your name is Laurence Mullen. Forty-five years have passed since that day at the conservatorium. You are, and have been for a long time, the drummer (Larry Mullen) in the band U2.

A lot happened in that moment at the door. Larry’s mother could have simply kept walking. But like a good coach, she was observant, she noticed something that had caught her son’s attention. And like a good coach she acted as a catalyst. There was no way she was planning to be his personal energy force. She already appreciated ‘enabling’, which is why she had put him in an environment where something like that could happen.

A coach can play a crucial role in assisting individuals or teams to participate in such ‘enabling events’ and thus help them to identify the sweet spots and dead spots in their motivational ecosystem. But we don’t need a coach for this; all we need is a thoughtful (and hopefully prayerful) family, community or tribe of some kind, which knows that ordinary old enabling is one of the secret weapons of life.

Why put prayer in the mix? It’s in there because when it comes to creativity and motivation, there’s strong evidence that prayer journeys can play a powerful role in our experience of learning. Anyone who has ever had to teach a class or train a team knows that if an individual has an unresolved spiritual crisis in their life it’s that much harder for them to learn. It affects everything, all the time.

Such crises could be anything from a bent idea of God to a bitter feud with a family member to something as broad as a ‘crisis of meaning’. Sometimes it’s not even a crisis; it’s simply a nagging question. What if it’s true, for example, that there’s a Higher Power out there who loves you deeply and is hoping to come to a place where you will be happy to be ‘found’ by it? Add to that the supposedly preposterous idea of asking that Higher Power for help with your journey into the universe of creativity.

Enabling is not just about providing opportunities by the way; sometimes it’s about restraint. Too much enabling can ironically disable, putting the brain and the mind to sleep. NRL coaches complain that their players are becoming over-enabled and lacking in the backbone and creativity that thrives when a player faces the pain of deprivation, even repression and criticism, which is of course where galvanizing and enabling overlap.

When stone blocks fall from the great grey sky
And the earth splits open in the heart of my hearts
And fire flows freely across the land.

I take a long drive and I don’t come back
Till the mother of love and the father of joy
The river of mud and the barking dogs
The laughing brothers with the shining eyes
And the old mountain tank with the clean white rock
—that rock.

Are rolling around in the heart of my hearts
And the deep blue flows through the back of my days
And makes me sing till the lights go out
Till the lights go out
Out.

The mother of love and the father of joy
The river of mud and the barking dogs
The laughing brothers with the shining eyes
The old mountain tank with the clean white rock
—that rock.

Rolling around in the heart of my hearts
The deep blue flows till the lights go out
In the heart of my hearts.

And fire flows freely in the river of mud
With the barking dogs
And the laughing brothers
And the shining eyes
Where the deep blue flows by the old mountain tank.